Clause 18 - Applications for registration.
Vehicles (Crime) Bill
4:45 pm
Mr John Bercow (Buckingham, Conservative)
I was referring to the hon. Member for Norwich, South (Mr. Clarke), although it would have been reasonable of me to have been referring to the hon. Member for Streatham (Mr. Hill). However, the latter was not referred to in The Guardian yesterday as a future leader of the Labour party. The hon. Member for Norwich, South has been, and that could be the cause of internal tension or friction. I hope that it is not. [Interruption.] The Ministers shaking hands is not very reassuring. I recall the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and his immediate predecessor not merely shaking hands in public, but kissing each other. However, that did not mean that they were not knifing each other mightily in the back behind the scenes. The fact that we have witnessed a public shaking of hands in front of your august chairmanship, Mr. Sayeed, is not revealing or inconclusive.
Surely the Minister of State would have given some thought to such charges. If we are to be sure that the proposed fee levels will be reasonable, it is not unreasonable to ask him to insert in the Bill the catch-all safeguard constituted by the word ``only''. That might be the only point in this afternoon's consideration of the amendment. We want the clause to state:
The level of fees shall be set only in order to recover the reasonable costs incurred by the Secretary of State in connection with the administration of this Part.
There is good reason to be concerned about such a point and to flag up the desirability, if not the necessity, of that all-encompassing protection that our amendment would confer. I say that, not least because I hope that I shall be in order in so doing, but because I have previously flagged up such worries about levies, charges and fees in Standing Committees, and on the Floor of the House in a ten-minute Bill on taxation and the right to know on 6 June last year, when I referred to the phenomenon of stealth taxes. In short, too much tax is taken from too many people who are told too little about it. That is a burgeoning phenomenon under this Administration.
I shall not burden the Committee with details because you, Mr. Sayeed, would not approve if I were to dilate on the subject, but we know that the typical family is paying an extra £670 a year in taxation under this Government. The Chancellor of the Exchequer refuses to publish the figures that show the impact of direct and indirect taxes on the typical family and on households in other income deciles. We know that he was rightly excoriated in paragraphs 90 and 35 of the Treasury Committee report of April 2000 for his refusal to provide such information to the House on which proper judgments could be made about the fee-raising, charge-levying and tax-hiking policies of this Administration.
The problem that led us to table such an early amendment is that the Bill provides many opportunities—I put it no more strongly than that—for the Government to raise additional funds for the Treasury. That is only one of many areas in which we are dependent on and subject to the tender mercies of new Labour's aspirant Prime Minister, if I may so describe the Minister of State. I may be embarrassing him today by praising him repeatedly, but he deserves that accolade. He has done a lot of good work. He is a talented, highly important, extremely influential, greatly respected man, who has many commitments and a full diary. It is right that I should highlight his significance. He would not want to court extensive and growing unpopularity, either in Norwich, South—even if he feels that he is secure there, although we certainly would not accept that he is—or in the country at large. He has a wider initiative, which might be described as the Clarke game plan, and it would be unfortunate if anything got in the way of it.
The Minister has considerable political antennae, so he would not want deliberately to impose charges that would upset large numbers of small businesses. Most businesses in the sector are small, and some are micro businesses. However, although he is a powerful, assiduous and ambitious Minister, he is only a Home Office Minister. I say that in no discourteous or pejorative sense—but he is not a Treasury Minister.
Our concern is that, if there is a provision for charges to be levied, fees to be imposed and stealth taxes to be raised, and the Government get into a difficult situation, the Minister will as likely as not—in fact, it is as sure as the passage of the seasons—be approached by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He would not be approached by a mere junior Treasury Minister; only the most senior Minister could approach him. The Chancellor will say, ``'Ere, you remember clause 18 of that Vehicles (Crime) Bill? You did manage to hold the line and keep clause 18 as it stood, didn't you? I hope that you did not allow those beastly Conservatives, the hon. Members for Buckingham, for Mid-Norfolk (Mr. Simpson) and for Vale of York to insist on the insertion of the amendment `shall be set only in order to recover'.''
The Minister may be able to say, ``No, Chancellor, I withstood the tide and held back the flood. I fobbed them off and told them that I fully intended to be reasonable. But of course that was a couple of years ago and the situation is different now—some people will have forgotten.'' Fortunately, however, not everyone will have forgotten, and verbatim accounts of the proceedings will be available, as they are not for yesterday afternoon's defective proceedings of the Programming Sub-Committee. I want the Minister to put on record an absolute commitment, as reflected in a willingness to accept our amendment, that the fees will be set only so as to recover reasonable costs.
On Second Reading, we expressed our desire that the Bill should tackle crime effectively but not be over-burdensome to businesses. I said on that occasion:
There are real grievances about the Bill.
If memory serves me correctly, I said that in response to an uncharacteristically rude and abrupt sedentary intervention from the Under-Secretary. The Home Secretary's attention was momentarily distracted—he was engaged in a conversation—and I exhorted him to listen to the point that I was making. The Under-Secretary yelled out, in a most undignified manner, ``Why should he listen?'' I do not have the text of the debate in front of me, but if the Under-Secretary checks, he will find that that is correct. I replied that the Home Secretary should listen because
There are real grievances about the Bill. There are anxieties about cost. There are concerns about over-regulation. There is a desire that it should achieve the purpose that has been established for it.—[Official Report, 18 December 2000; Vol. 360, c. 50.]